Crystal Palace vs Nottingham Forest Betting Tips & Preview

Crystal Palace to win

Crystal Palace are the pick to beat Nottingham Forest when the two sides meet in the Premier League this weekend, and the case rests largely on where each club finds itself heading into the fixture. Palace have won three of their last five outings, including victories over Fulham, Middlesbrough and Lech Poznań, and even their blip against Ipswich Town came sandwiched between wins. Forest, by contrast, arrive having won only once in their last five and having lost their most recent match to Coventry City. The model puts Palace's chances at 39.5%, comfortably the most likely of the three outcomes even if it's short of a coin-flip, and with the best price on offer at 2.62 that's simply where the market happens to sit — the selection is made because it's the outcome most likely to occur, not because of any gap between the two numbers.

Recent Form

Palace's form line over their last five fixtures reads WWLWD, a spread that shows genuine quality but also the odd lapse in concentration. Wins over Fulham and Middlesbrough either side of the Ipswich defeat suggest they can be relied upon against teams around and below them, while the draw at Leeds United was at least a point taken on the road. The Lech Poznań result adds another win to the recent sequence, and overall there's a sense of a side building some momentum into this one.

Forest's recent run is far choppier. They lost to Leeds United, drew with both Liverpool and Tottenham Hotspur, beat Aston Villa, and then slipped up against Coventry City in their last outing. That's a solitary win from five, with three draws mixed in, and while the results against Liverpool and Spurs show they can hang with strong opposition, the inability to turn games into wins — and the defeat to Coventry most recently — points to a team short on consistency right now.

Head-to-Head

History between these two clubs leans firmly Forest's way, even if actual victories have been rare for either side. Across the last five meetings Crystal Palace have failed to win a single one, with the record standing at four draws and one defeat from Palace's perspective. The lone decisive result came back in October 2024, when Nottingham Forest won at the City Ground. Every other recent meeting — in February 2026, August 2025, May 2025 and March 2024 — ended level, a pattern that suggests these two have tended to cancel each other out whenever they've met.

That stalemate-heavy history is worth bearing in mind, because it cuts against a confident home win on paper. But head-to-head trends only tell you so much when the two teams' current form has diverged as clearly as it has here, and recent league results carry more weight than a run of draws from matches played under different circumstances.

Team News

Crystal Palace have a notable injury list to contend with. Jean-Philippe Mateta remains out with a hamstring injury suffered back in August, while Ismaïla Sarr continues to be sidelined by a groin problem from around the same time. Chadi Riad is absent following knee surgery, and Anan Khalaili has more recently joined the list with a muscle strain picked up in October. That's four senior absentees for Palace to work around, with the forward areas looking particularly thin given Mateta and Sarr are both missing.

Nottingham Forest's situation is far simpler by comparison, with Willy Boly the only player listed as sidelined, nursing a knee injury that has kept him out since February. With no other absentees reported for Forest, they go into this one with closer to a full squad to choose from, even if Palace's underlying form still gives them the edge in this preview's selection.